Accident stalls tour of big star from India

LOS ANGELES-- Nobody expected the bottom to drop out on A.R. Rahman's world tour.

A Bollywood megastar and prolific film composer estimated to have sold more than 350 million albums worldwide, he is revered as a musical demigod among Indians.

LOS ANGELES-- Nobody expected the bottom to drop out on A.R. Rahman's world tour.

A Bollywood megastar and prolific film composer estimated to have sold more than 350 million albums worldwide, he is revered as a musical demigod among Indians.

In the United States, Rahman is best-known as the guy behind the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack, who nabbed two Oscars, a Golden Globe and two Grammys for his propulsive contributions to the hit 2008 indie romance.

Earlier this month, as he embarked on his "A.R. Rahman Jai Ho Concert: The Journey Home World Tour," Rahman's plan was twofold: to connect with his adoring Desi - southern Asian - fans while also tapping into his newfound popularity among non-Desis.

Steeped in spectacle and exerting a high-tech razzle-dazzle more in step with, say, Lady Gaga than a composer dubbed "the Mozart of Madras," the tour went off without a hitch in New York, New Jersey and Chicago.

But disaster struck when Rahman hit Detroit on June 19.

According to artistic director Amy Tinkham, the infrastructure at Detroit's Pontiac Silverdome wasn't strong enough to support a lighting rig and buckled beneath its weight. The apparatus came crashing down, destroying part of the stage. Worse still, equipment and sets designed for the tour were rendered unusable.

"It's a miracle my team escaped with minor injuries," Rahman said last week.

He has postponed his remaining U.S. and Canadian tour dates until at least fall.

The predicament represents a significant setback for Rahman in his quest to connect with Western audiences as no Indian pop star before him, while still relatively hot off his Slumdog success.

Two years have passed since Slumdog became a cultural touchstone and Rahman's triumphant closing anthem, JaiHo, became a smash hit.

He spent much of 2009 collecting awards and basking in the glow.

Still, reached by phone in Chicago earlier this month, before his Detroit set disaster, the soft-spoken composer, 44, acknowledged that he might have been slow off the mark to capitalize on that momentum with a world tour.

"In practice, it should have been last year," Rahman said. "But, creatively, we needed time to put this together."

His manager, Amos Newman, said before the mishap that the tour was to be a sort of introduction to American audiences.

"We intentionally designed the show to appeal even to someone unaware of who A.R. Rahman is," he said.

Regardless of the tour's postponement, Rahman has already begun expanding his international profile by collaborating with pop luminaries such as Sri Lankan alt-hip-hop star M.I.A. and Aussie pop diva Kylie Minogue, as well as lending his vocals to the star-studded charity single We Are the World 25 for Haiti.

"Indians in the U.S. have taken a big step forward in the past decade in entertainment, corporate America and politics," said Gitesh Pandya, head of the south Asian media-consulting firm BoxOfficeGuru.com.

"There is still so much more to achieve, but our place in this country is a bit more prominent now."